Some of the challenges in managing and supporting computer systems are the growing complexity of the components and their relationships within the greater system. To avoid unpredictable results, vendors set forth constraints for systems to describe what components are supported within a certain tolerance. Customers, however, typically do not want to be restricted by the vendors' constraints and prefer to control the types of components used in their systems and to manage those components. This presents a conflict, which is compounded by increasing system complexity.
One approach to avoiding unpredictable results is to implement a risk management system that determines whether a customer's system configuration meets the criteria of an ideal configuration. Conventional risk management systems use simple checks or rule engines to determine whether a customer's existing configuration meets the requirements of a new component. Each rule engine defines a simple If . . . Then . . . relationship, such as if the customer wants to install disk driver X and has hard disk drive Y, then there is a compatibility problem.
A problem arises in that the knowledge built into these conventional risk management systems and rule engines is static or difficult to update. Computer systems continually increase in complexity and the knowledge required to maintain the computer systems increases and changes. Therefore, conventional risk management systems are inadequate for services organizations that support dynamic computer systems.
An additional problem is that, although conventional systems can define a simple If . . . Then . . . relationship to diagnose a fault, they are unable to understand why a failure happened or preempt the failure.
Further, in serviced computer systems, problems tend to repeat and the more complex the problems are, the more difficult it typically is to detect the problems. Thus, conventional fault management systems typically cannot detect the problems as often the problems are not manifested as known faults in the system.